I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and, amongst other things, to over-the-air calibrating an antenna array.
II. Background
Wireless networking systems have become a prevalent means by which a majority of people worldwide has come to communicate. Wireless communication devices have become smaller and more powerful in order to meet consumer needs and to improve portability and convenience. The increase in processing power in mobile devices such as cellular telephones has lead to an increase in demands on wireless network transmission systems. Such systems typically are not as easily updated as the cellular devices that communicate there over. As mobile device capabilities expand, it can be difficult to maintain an older wireless network system in a manner that facilitates fully exploiting new and improved wireless device capabilities.
More particularly, frequency division based techniques typically separate the spectrum into distinct channels by splitting it into uniform chunks of bandwidth, for example, division of the frequency band allocated for wireless cellular telephone communication can be split into channels, each of which can carry a voice conversation or, with digital service, carry digital data. Each channel can be assigned to only one user at a time. One commonly utilized variant is an orthogonal frequency division technique that effectively partitions the overall system bandwidth into multiple orthogonal subcarriers. These subcarriers are also referred to as tones, carriers, bins, and/or frequency channels. With time division based techniques, a band is split time-wise into sequential time slices or time slots. Each user of a channel may be provided with a time slice for transmitting and receiving information in a round-robin manner. For example, at any given time t, a user is provided access to the channel for a short burst. Then, access switches to another user who is provided with a short burst of time for transmitting and receiving information. The cycle of “taking turns” continues, and eventually each user is provided with multiple transmission and reception bursts.
Code division based techniques typically transmit data over a number of frequencies available at any time in a range. In general, data is digitized and spread over available bandwidth, wherein multiple users can be overlaid on the channel and respective users can be assigned a unique sequence code. Users can transmit in the same wide-band chunk of spectrum, wherein each user's signal is spread over the entire bandwidth by its respective unique spreading code. This technique can provide for sharing, wherein one or more users can concurrently transmit and receive. Such sharing can be achieved through spread spectrum digital modulation, wherein a user's stream of bits is encoded and spread across a very wide channel in a pseudo-random fashion. The receiver is designed to recognize the associated unique sequence code and undo the randomization in order to collect the bits for a particular user in a coherent manner.
A typical wireless communication network (e.g., employing frequency, time, and code division techniques) includes one or more base stations that provide a coverage area and one or more mobile (e.g., wireless) terminals that can transmit and receive data within the coverage area. A typical base station can simultaneously transmit multiple data streams for broadcast, multicast, and/or unicast services, wherein a data stream is a stream of data that can be of independent reception interest to a mobile terminal. A mobile terminal within the coverage area of that base station can be interested in receiving one, more than one or all the data streams carried by the composite stream. Likewise, a mobile terminal can transmit data to the base station or another mobile terminal. Such communication between base station and mobile terminal or between mobile terminals can be degraded due to channel variations and/or interference power variations. For example, the aforementioned variations can affect base station scheduling, power control and/or rate prediction for one or more mobile terminals.
When antenna arrays and/or base stations are employed in conjunction with a time domain duplexed (TDD) channel transmission technique, very large gains can be realized. A key assumption in realizing these gains is that due to the TDD nature of the transmission and reception, both the forward link (FL) and reverse link (RL) observe similar physical propagation channels corresponding to a common carrier frequency. However, in practice the overall transmit and receive chains, which can include the analog front ends and the digital sampling transmitters and receivers, as well as the physical cabling and antenna architecture, contribute to the over all channel response experienced by the receiver. In other words, the receiver will see an overall or equivalent channel between the input of the transmitter digital to analog converter (DAC) and the output of the receiver analog to digital converter (ADC), which can comprise the analog chain of the transmitter, the physical propagation channel, the physical antenna array structure (including cabling), and the analog receiver chain.
In view of at least the above, there exists a need in the art for a system and/or methodology of calibrating in antenna arrays employed in wireless communication devices.